I feel wound down, this means that the lecturing season must definitely be over. How do I know I'm wound down, well its easy, I am not talking to myself, a habit born of stress, its worries my kids, but their mum my wife has come to realise its a harmless pass-time. As the stress increases with the academic year do I talk to myself more? No, I talk less! that’s because more people are in the conversation, bugger, am I nuts, no not yet, but the day may well be coming. I comfort myself with certain knowledge that I am far from the worst case, there are those who by the end of the year cannot differentiate dreams from reality, bury themselves in obscure beliefs with accompanying artefacts that you either trip over or bump your head on in the staff room from Feng Shui to gargoyles, horse shoes (dozens of those), lecturers who refuse to speak unless they switch on a personal recorder (because by the evening they will have forgotten everything) and of course those weird and bizarre rashes and ailments that seem to erupt among some of the more seriously walking wounded among us. I have lost count of how many staff get promoted only to go down with depression, must be a tenuous connection there somewhere.

The end of summer term actually represents if anything an insecure time for lectures and teachers, because unlike all the others it does actually give you time to recover, though be it short given the continuing erosion of the recess by old PMT and her SMT . Insecure because you have time to speculate and think, yes its risky really. I have been thinking about the final outcome of all this dumming down and compromising, I mean how can we measure the final result of it, if any? I came across a statistic recently; in the last 100 years 54% of all patents came from Britain, 25% from thre US and 5% from Japan, this is surely in some way a measure of the success of an education system, I wonder what the next 100 years will bring?